Search 340M+ academic papers — citation graphs, semantic similarity, and AI literature reviews.
Most developer tooling work still happens through a UI a human drives. Nobleblocks MCP server moves it into the conversation instead. Search 340M+ academic papers — citation graphs, semantic similarity, and AI literature reviews.
Search 340 million deduplicated academic papers from Claude Desktop, Claude Web, ChatGPT, Cursor, VS Code Copilot, or any MCP-compatible tool. Covers 15+ academic databases — all cross-linked through a biomedical knowledge graph with 1.3M+ entities and 109M+ paper connections.
The server publishes 6 tools. What each one is for:
search_papers — Full-text + semantic hybrid search with year/citation/source filtersget_paper — Fetch metadata by DOI, PMID, arXiv ID, or OpenAlex IDfind_similar — Find papers related by meaning, not just keyword matchingget_citation_graph — Citation network — references and citing paperssearch_by_entity — Find papers linked to a gene, drug, disease, or institution via the KGcreate_literature_review — AI-generated structured lit review with citations (Pro)Because this one is hosted, setup is mostly authentication — you point your client at the endpoint and approve access. Nothing runs on your machine, so there is no runtime to keep patched.
Configuration is passed through the environment: NOBLEBLOCKS_API_KEY. Treat anything key-shaped as a real credential — scope it to the minimum the server needs, and rotate it if it ever lands in a shared config.
This sits in the developer tooling group, where several servers overlap in what they claim to do but differ sharply once you actually set them up. Nobleblocks's toolset — search_papers, get_paper, find_similar and 3 more — is a fair guide to whether it matches your workflow. It is maintained by com.nobleblocks; worth a glance at recent repository activity before you build anything load-bearing on it.
We check each listing at SyncDev against the project's documentation before it goes live — if something here drifts out of date, it is a bug worth reporting.
| Tool | What it does |
|---|---|
| search_papers | Full-text + semantic hybrid search with year/citation/source filters |
| get_paper | Fetch metadata by DOI, PMID, arXiv ID, or OpenAlex ID |
| find_similar | Find papers related by meaning, not just keyword matching |
| get_citation_graph | Citation network — references and citing papers |
| search_by_entity | Find papers linked to a gene, drug, disease, or institution via the KG |
| create_literature_review | AI-generated structured lit review with citations (Pro) |
{
"mcpServers": {
"nobleblocks": {
"command": "npx",
"args": ["-y", "@modelcontextprotocol/inspector"],
"env": {
"NOBLEBLOCKS_API_KEY": "your-value"
}
}
}
}Add to claude_desktop_config.json, then restart Claude Desktop.
| Variable | Description | Required |
|---|---|---|
| NOBLEBLOCKS_API_KEY | Credential the server authenticates with. | Yes |
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